I normally don’t sell anything in my posts here on Think Artificial. In fact, I’ve never done so nor allowed anyone else to. However, this is uniquely related to our topic of interest and may benefit some lucky readers.

I’m considering selling a few of my augmented reality domains; originally intended to be put to use, other projects have gotten in the way. It seems a shame to leave them parked. So, here they are.

The domain list

Augmented-Realities.net

AugmentedRealityMobile.net

AugmentedRealityMobile.org

AugmentedRealityOnline.com

AugmentingRealities.com

HandheldAugmentedReality.com

iPhoneAugmentedReality.net

MMORPGAugmentedReality.com

Make an offer

Contact me directly to make me an offer on any of these domains. I intend to keep prices fair. I want to see them go to deserving individuals and startups.

I reserve the right to accept or deny offers based on personal preference.

The now famed Layar announced yesterday that it’s planning a major addition to their augmented reality platform: an ability to view 3D objects, animation and place 3D tags on buildings, etc. The addition is scheduled to be released in November, allowing 500+ developers to play with it through API.

Looks like Layar is going to keep their lead in the field; from their press release:

Layar 3D makes use of OpenGL, the accelerometer, the GPS and the compass of the phone. Developers can place 3D objects in their content layers based on coordinates. Objects can be optimized in size and orientation to create an immersive and realistic experience. The 3D capabilities support live downloading and rendering of 3D objects. Actions such as “open link” or “play music” can be assigned to 3D objects. [Press release]

Looking forward to early results from the minds of their developers.Embedded videos after the jump

Correct prediction

Undetermined

Wrong prediction

Today we’re launching a special page to store past and present predictions regarding future technology developments. At the moment all are in the area of augmented reality. Below is a list of new predictions; the complete list can be found on the new Predictions page. The page can also be accessed through its link in Think Artificial’s header-menu.

The notification came yesterday and what a delightful wake-up call. I knew there’d been about a thousand submissions last year, and that they’d had to make a delay this one due to an increase, so it was quite unexpected. (Each category is drastically different—but it still makes my head spin to be on a list with Ars Technica! Awesome.)

My thanks go out to the judges, bows to the fellow finalists and best wishes all around!

If you’re a Firefox user and live on the web like I do, neck deep in trying out new features and beta services, then you should give Mozilla Lab’s Ubiquity a try. It’s an experimental plugin for FF that reminds me a lot of the desktop application Quicksilver.

By a key combination you bring up a command-line interface that let’s you write natural language instructions. For example, selecting text on page, bringing up the window and then typing “email this to xyz@something.com“. A similar example is translation; i.e. translate this to French. I’ve recently been migrating many of my desktop activities to web applications, including moving entirely from desktop email to Gmail, and a big plus for me is that Ubiquity works with Gmail right out of the box.

We’ll now be able to maintain better visual and personalized presence around Think Artificial. After some CSS struggling due to discrepancies between Firefox and Safari page rendering, I’ve finished implementing Gravatars on the site! (I’m sorry IE6 users, I don’t have time to test and accommodate a broken browser — please get Firefox).

If your comment shows up with a gray person like the third comment above, it means you’ll have to get yourself a Gravatar. If you haven’t heard of Gravatars, or Globally Recognized Avatars, they’re a service that allows you to upload and associate an avatar with your e-mail address. Since they’re in use by many popular websites, it’ll spare you some time when commenting or creating accounts there—all you’ll have to do is enter your email address and they’ll pop up automatically (email encrypted via the MD5 algorithm). For the record, the people on the pic with me above are Gnorb and Esther — both of which run great blogs.

Check out this really amazing animation artwork done through a web interface to the ContextFree.js library created by Aza Raskin, a port of the open source application by Chris Coyn. It provides means of creating beautiful generative art with minuscule amounts of code. Make sure you watch it to the end where the Sierpiński triangle is generated with 3 lines of code.

I’ve been tagged by my blog buddy in-arms Tim Stevens to write seven random (and not so random) facts about myself. (Yes, blog memes are still alive and well.) So it’s about time to shake things up with something personal.

The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

You must excuse that I thought about what I should write due to a failure in my random-thought function. But the following are selected facts from a brainstorm.

The se7en random facts

Six years ago I underwent brain surgery. I had a tumor the size of a large chicken egg pushing on my cerebellum. Keen eyes can spot the tumor on the online 3D model of my brain.

Since I left kindergarten all friends I’ve made have been older than I am.

I’m an agnostic atheist. My mother fears I’ll go to hell.

I read Snow Crash in English when I was 10 years old. My teacher couldn’t believe I understood it and questioned me about its content. (Remember that I’m Icelandic)

I take pride in that last fact and sometimes mention it in vain.

I recently started doing Zen-flavored meditation.

The lovely summer of 2006, a baby raven with a crooked leg landed in my lap. I fixed his leg with braces and raised him for a year. (that’s him in the header pic). He’s living in the wild now. I miss that crazy bird dearly.

Last month I invited readers to apply for invitations to Twine.com, one of the major players in this first wave of semantic web applications. Twine is still in a private, invitation only beta; meaning it’s an incomplete product under heavy development (Twine intro). Due to this I set some conditions for invitees last time. But as promised, here’s the second round of invitations — this time unconditional (I know you’re all ‘telligent and enthusiastic).

Simply leave a short comment on this post if you’re interested in giving Twine a spin. An invitation will be sent to the email address you specify in the comment’s field.

I exchanged emails with Julian Corbett, head of Business Development at Vollee, who revealed that the Mobile Second Life Client (SL) would not be limited to 3G but that Wi-Fi connectivity would also be enabled. This begged three additional questions which were courteously answered by Corbett.

In short, the following was clarified:

iPhone’s will be supported by Vollee.

The Mobile SL client will be Wi-Fi enabled in addition to 3G.

The Client seen in the video (see last post) is a Java implementation.